


Down Among the Dead Men

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, M/M, Self-cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-16
Updated: 2005-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:30:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Not all ghosts are dead."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down Among the Dead Men

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Pornish Pixies community on LJ. Challenge: _Doppelganger_

Not all ghosts are dead.

This place is full of them. Breeds them, he's imagined once or twice, as other castles breed rats—growing them fat on crumbs of memory and magic, then casting them off to multiply in the dark. There's too much time here. Too many lives for even a space this size to hold without bubbling up and buckling in places, making inviting nests in cold, shadowy corners and long-forgotten rooms.

He can hear them, if he listens hard. In the times when there's trouble and the phantoms get restless, whispering and rustling over whether to abandon this sinking ship once and for all. In the midwinter nights when a fire goes out. In the quiet summertime when the classes are empty and the corridors are hollow and still as tombs.

Tonight is cold for August, the last in a week of rain that's sent a chill down into the very bones of the castle. That's what Argus Filch is thinking about as the hour creeps towards midnight. Not ghosts, dead or alive, not yet. He's thinking about the cold, and the work that's done, and the work there's still to do, with his aching back and throbbing hands somewhere in between.

The only sounds are the ticking of his pocket-watch, the slosh of the water, and the scrape-scrape-scrape against the stones as he drags the bucket down the hall. He rounds the corner where the west wing meets east, on the lookout for cobwebs and rusting armour as he trundles past row upon row of abandoned classrooms and old storage closets too far-flung to be of any use these days.

It's been an age since he's come down this way. During the term, muddy feet run in the other direction and sticky fingers don't give any classroom window a moment's rest. The air is stale and still down here and, shut up against the draught, the stones seem to shrug off the dust. This place survives as a little pocket of the past, the portraits sleeping for years on end in the interminable quiet.

He should like it here, but he doesn't.

His breathing has long since started to fray around the edges, his heart straining as he trudges up another set of steps, down a cold and narrow passageway and back into the lamplight. The stones grumble as the wall closes behind him, and that's how he very nearly misses it—the sound.

He comes to a halt in the middle of an undistinguished corridor. He holds his breath.

There it is again: a faint whistle.

It's only the ghost of a noise, somewhere behind one sturdy oak door among twenty. He frowns, certain for a moment that his ears are playing tricks on him, that it's merely the wind chasing itself around the turrets.

Then it comes yet again, high and distant, a warbling tune just familiar enough for him to judge it off-key.

And on any other night, it would only be another sigh before he charged in and caught up whichever miscreant it was this time and dragged the little bugger off for a slap on the wrist from the headmaster. On any other night, it wouldn't be a puzzle. But this is summertime, and Himself is off to London for the week, and that lout Hagrid is hunkered down in his hut with his godforsaken menagerie raising a din to rival the storm.

It's only him and Missus home tonight. The house-elves can't whistle, and the house ghosts don't come down this way; if they liked quiet, they'd have stayed dead.

He hoists up his mop as he creeps towards the source of the sound. His palm is unaccountably sweating as he slowly turns a doorknob. He winces as it gives a rusty squeak of protest.

Only Peeves, he thinks, quashing down the sudden spark of unease that jumps up inside him. Only Peeves, to be chased out and shouted at and cleaned up after in his wake. Only Peeves.

He pulls the door open.

"You—boy! What do you think you're doing?"

The whistling stops.

For the splinter of a second it occurs to him to wonder just how in God's name the little beast managed to sneak in here with the place sealed up tight as a drum—flittering through the possibilities of stowaway, vagabond, thief.

But before the boy even turns to face him, Argus knows that this is no student.

He makes a grab for the wall as his knees threaten to buckle, and then he scrubs at his eyes like the fool in a comic play. The sight refuses to falter, insisting that he sees a boy coloured like an old photograph before him, faint and faded, moving in stiff little flickers. The room seems to reel when he blinks, the floor shifting under him as the other end of the cupboard slips between arm's reach and a mile away and back again.

The boy carefully lifts the ghost of a box from at his feet and lays it down on the shelf before regarding him without the slightest curiosity.

"I'm waiting for my master."

It speaks. That's a child's voice he hears, as plain as day—could still sing soprano if it wanted to. He knows that voice, and he knows that face too. Pretty faces are all alike, but an ugly one's all its own. His mother's dead eyes in a sullen, pox-scarred face. A wet clay clump of a nose. That sour, smart mouth with a lip split.

Trembling, he makes a slow circle of the boy, examining him cautiously from all sides. That's not right, he was never that small, was he? Little runt barely looks as though he'd feed the squid, his fusty old trousers held up by a bit of cord run through the belt loops, raw-boned wrists sticking out past the cuffs of his shirt. There are bruises there. Yellow smudges from the broad hands that show him how to mend, how to scrub, how to do it the right way. Hands that yanked his shoulder out of joint the time he nearly touched the hot boiler.

He swallows hard. "Your master's dead, boy."

The boy's eyes flash in the light of the phantom lamp beside him, his face scrunching up in an ugly frown. "Liar!"

He absently shakes his head. Dead near fifty years. Old Apollyon went to bed one winter's night in '49 with a glass of brandy and a pain in his gut and never woke up to see morning. Argus buried him out back with the others, the help, the house-elves, under the great old elm in a grave he dug himself from the frozen ground.

He takes a tentative step closer to the scowling boy, reaching out with an unsteady hand—wondering if it will pass right through him with the same unholy shudder that comes with laying hands on a ghost.

Instead, he feels the boy's shirt brush against his fingertips. A moment too late, like the echo of a touch, but solid enough for him to pinch the worn fabric between thumb and finger.

The boy gives him a strange look, edging away and turning back to his work.

Argus watches, unblinking. If it weren't for his breath coming in hard, ragged puffs or the pain in his left arm, he would think he was already dead.

The whistling begins anew, a grating sound. After a moment, the creaky tune takes shape in his mind, the words following on its heels.

_Here's a health to the king and a lasting peace, may faction end and wealth in-crease..._

A hard, uneasy weight settles in his stomach as he watches the boy stack the same box over and over again, the bundle disappearing the moment it's laid on the shelf, reappearing at the boy's feet.

The boy doesn't appear to notice or pay further mind to him. He crouches and he stands, his wayward tune punctuated by faint, boyish grunts of effort. Argus has never seen a ghost sweat before. He watches the dark vee at the back of the boy's shirt spread until, with a sigh, the apparition plucks at his buttons and tugs his tails out, tossing it aside to float like a feather to the floor.

The room goes suddenly silent. The boy stretches shamelessly, brown as a heathen, not a hair on his chest. His trousers slip down on his narrow hips.

Dread uncurls inside Argus's belly. The door swings slowly shut. He knows this place. He knows this _when._

The boy...the boy is fourteen years old. He's yet to see a school year at Hogwarts—this quiet is all he knows. He loves it. He has a warm pallet right in front of the fire and more food than he knows what to do with. It's this very date in August, 1942. It's a Friday, and at midnight, old Apollyon is going to walk through that door full of the drink and teach him a lesson that has nothing to do with the castle. Show him what men do and what boys let happen.

_Come let us drink it while we have breath, for there's no drink-ing aft-er death..._

He remembers the song, the one the fellows at the pub used to sing when they were too drunk to remember the words to the bawdy ones. The boy hits the wrong high note every time.

"Shut up," he whispers.

But the boy pays him no notice, the hard young muscles in his arms straining as he lifts the box again.

Argus breaks out in a cold sweat.

Parchment. He'd been shelving parchment. Heavy sheaves, and little boxes of chalk that rattled and clinked gently together as he stacked them in neat columns and rows.

The smell of new paper and the heat of close quarters overtake him. It makes his belly wind up tight, twisting in a way that's painful and pleasurable all at once.

"Shut up." His voice is hoarse, his mouth suddenly dry as dust. "Shut up and put your bloody shirt back on."

The boy whistles louder.

And what happens next...

He only means to pick up the shirt. To pick up the shirt and make the boy put it on, that's all he means to do—but then his hand is curling tight around a bare shoulder, and something feels like it's snapped inside him as he _shoves_ the boy against the shelves.

"Shut—Up!"

The little bastard hits hard enough to smack the shelves against the walls. Argus hears the little whoof of air that's knocked out of him, the memory as real on the outside as it is inside his head. He remembers the long, thin bruise the middle shelf made digging into his ribs. Remembers the sudden thickness in the air, the heat all around him as a big hand groped between his legs.

"W-what are you doing?"

The cracking voice brings him up short.

He freezes, his eyes barely darting down to find that his hand has clamped down _there_. He can feel the boy tremble, and for a moment he's nearly moved by pity. For heaven's sake, he's just a little lad. Wouldn't even be a fourth year yet, had his lot been different. Just a boy with no mother or father to call his own, not even a kitten, not yet.

Argus can very nearly smell him, a phantom scent. He shuts his eyes tight and breathes it in, remembering what it was like to be clean. Pure, salt sweat that at fourteen had barely begun to be tainted by musk and filth.

Then he feels the boy stir under his hand. A stiff little prick swelling up. Something hot and angry spikes inside him, making him dizzy with it. He's hard, and so is he, and he sees the boy for what he is.

Wicked little beast. A nasty pervert thinking awful thoughts at night, doing sinful things under the covers. Thinks no one knows that he had his first come in the little dark room in back of the pub, listening to the second man of the night huffing and puffing on top of his mother. But Argus knows. He knows it all, and he's the only one who can make the boy hurt for what he's done.

One swift tug brings those ragged trousers down, and the boy doesn't make a sound, doesn't even try to fight him like a man. Argus feels himself filled up with the same sick, shaky rage that overtakes him when he thinks about reining in the other wicked boys. The feeling he gets when he slides his hands down the cold chains, when he hits the walls with his master's old whips for the feel of it, for the sweet sound they make.

But he doesn't hit the boy. For a long moment he simply stares at the spectre, hardly recognisable as a child anymore—barely more than an animal, a skinned, peltless little beast shivering with its tail between its legs.

Instead, he finds himself pressing against him. Pressing close, his prick so hard that it hurts, like a steel dagger, sharp and unyielding, hungry to cut.

The boy quavers, and Argus can feel him through his trousers, neither warm like flesh nor cold like the grave. He feels like...like nothing.

"You're _nothing_."

The boy whimpers, scrawny hands curling around the edge of the shelf. Argus knows his eyes are squeezing shut, that he's saying his prayers under his breath, but the little wretch makes no move to stop him. Not even when Argus starts to rub against him, and God, it feels so good, right down to the pit of his stomach, right down to the marrow of his bones. Deep down good like it's never felt for him before, not ever, not ever, and the boy starts to cry.

"Shut up," he whispers. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Quit your whingeing, you miserable, puling little maggot.

He tears his trousers open, choking on a growl as he touches something like skin. The boy wriggles, a contrary pup, but he never says stop, doesn't give voice to anything. It would serve the little bastard right if he did it—fucked him. Tore him up and made him scream. It's summertime, and no one would hear him. The wicked thing might plead and beg, but he'll come nonetheless in his master's hand and make a liar of himself, because he could stop it if he wanted to, if he just wished it hard enough.

That's all that magic is. His mother had said so a million times. Magic is just closing your eyes and wishing hard enough to get it, and if the boy wanted him to stop badly enough, he would _stop_ him instead of squirming back against him, sobbing like a wanton.

"Whore," he spits. "Little slut!"

Then his fingers dig hard into the boy's ghostly flesh as a shudder wracks him, and he comes like he's never come before in his life, stabbing against the boy until he's covered with filth and sweat and every bit of loathing he has in him.

"...please."

This time his knees don't hold him, and he crumples to the floor, hitting the cold stones with relief to feel something wholly real. He stares. The boy's legs are trembling, dripping with the stuff. His narrow little shoulders are shaking. A long moment passes.

Then Argus blinks.

The boy is once more dressed. He lifts a box and places it on a shelf. He whistles.

_An' he who would this toast de-ny, Down a-mong the dead men, Down a-mong the dead men, down, down, down..._

Argus scrabbles to his feet when the boy's hand goes for his shirt buttons. He forgets his mop in the scuffle to get out. For a chilling moment, he's certain the door won't budge under his power, but it opens with a groan, and he hastens to put it between himself and the boy.

He imagined it. That was all, he tells himself. He's had too much to drink, he's worked too long tonight.

But his trousers are still unbuttoned, and he can still hear the faint song even after the door slams shut:

_Down a-mong the dead men, let him lie..._

He slumps down against the wall. Hand over his mouth, he sits for an eternity, listening to the crooked tune go on and on and on, until finally somewhere in the distance the clock strikes midnight. Then, creeping forward to press a desperate ear to the door, he hears the sound of footsteps approaching. Heavy steps from a pair of big black boots. The boy falls silent.

And before Argus hurries away, down the ghosts of hallways, back into the breathing castle and the present, he fumbles for his keys. He drops them twice from shaking hands, letting the jingle-jangle clash distract him from the slur of voices within. He finds the right key and fits it in, and he locks that door tight. If there's one thing he's learned in his miserable life, it's that if things cannot be forgotten, they can at least be locked away where they'll never get out. There are plenty of hiding places in this castle.

He shuts his ears against the sounds that follow him down the corridor.

That little coward deserves everything that's coming to him.


End file.
